A symposium on poverty, the safety net and child development: preface

Child poverty rates are lower and fell much less dramatically in dual-adult households. For these families, the transfer system is also much less instrumental in keeping them out of poverty. What emerges over this period is the striking role of the safety net in reducing the gap in poverty rates between lone- and dual-parent households, which stood at about 40 percentage points in the late 1990s and dropped to about 15 percentage points by the early 2020s.

This symposium is concerned with two key questions. First, does the experience of living in poverty as a child leave long-lasting scars as the child ages into adulthood? And second, can the government safety net mitigate these impacts?